By Anna Brentwood
People often ask me why I chose to write a story that
takes place in the 1920’s, but this story chose me. Hannah, my main character
came to me in a series of dreams that over a long period of time, I became
compelled to explore and eventually write about.
What I discovered when researching the 1920’s is a strong
respect for my character and her friends, all women who came of age in a world
that is as foreign to us today as an alien world on another planet would be.
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| Anna Brentwood |
The twenties were a time when people lived hard, worked
harder, smoked incessantly, drank continuously and got steady doses of heroin,
morphine, cocaine and opium in their soft drinks, candy or medicines. People
could pretty much get away with murder, and often did. It was a rough, bawdy
time where fortunes were lost or made in a single night and criminals became
kings. Fashion was innovative, shocking and society’s rules and morals and
tastes were being challenged daily.
City life was very different from country life but life in
general was brutally hard, short and contained very few pleasures. Even the
standards and luxuries of the very richest of that time pale in comparison to
the common luxuries we all take for granted today.
In The Songbird With
Sapphire Eyes, Hannah begins her life on a rural farm in Kansas where all her
widowed mother, Emalith does is work. A rainbow in a world of beige, young
Hannah yearns for a life that offers more than hard work.
A young woman's prospects for marriage were restricted to
the size of her town or neighborhood. It was common (and not a crime) for girls
as young as fifteen to be courted by men twenty, thirty or forty years older.
If a girl were a sheltered, so-called respectable girl, her family would have a
say in whom she could love or marry. Because there were so many “rules” between
family approvals, religious and social orientations, proper methods of meeting,
and because men were the ones who had to both initiate and propel courtship, a
woman’s choices, especially if she were poor were limited.
Few learned about the "birds and the bees"
factually and garnered the information through gossip, misinformation or
supposition witnessing animals mating outdoors or attending funerals of women
who died in childbirth. Puberty was shrouded in fear, shame and mystery and
when a girl started her menses, there was no such thing as sanitary pads or
tampons, and instead rags were bundled and boiled clean and reused. Usually
discreetly and G-D Forbid, never discussed openly.
One of the elderly widows I interviewed had grown up in
the country, in a small, rural Oregon town. She’d attended school in a one room
schoolhouse and as a young woman began working in a neighboring town as a law
clerk. She met a young man studying to be a lawyer and they got engaged. They
planned to marry after he finished his studies. She looked forward to finally
moving into her own home and starting a family.
One day after church she attended a cousin’s party. Her
male cousin’s friend, a young man new to the area and a Scot was nice but she
didn’t think much of him, his dress or his looks and quickly forgot all about
him. However, he did not forget about her. With seeming assistance from her
cousin, he seemed to pop up everywhere she went with her family. She didn’t
think much of it but it wasn’t more than a week or so later that her fiancée
suddenly began avoiding her. Soon after that to her utter shock, without
explanation he broke off their engagement.
She was heartbroken, but in those days, a respectable
young woman didn’t chase after a man or show up at his home uninvited or demand
an explanation.
Her cousin and his friend in tow started showing up on the
pretense of cheering her up. The Scot would sometimes show up alone or at her
work. He’d bring flowers, presents and tell her stories that made her laugh.
What she didn’t know at the time, but found out many years after she’d been
married to her persistent Scot was that he had purposely sabotaged her
engagement. While he never would admit the exact details of what he’d done, she
suspected he’d either threatened her beau or insinuated something that had
humiliated the fiancée.
Entranced by her romantic courtship, I asked her if she’d
“loved” him. Like every single woman of that era I spoke with, she was uncomfortable
with the term love. They all would shrug, stammer or say “I grew to love him…we were married for 60
years…or he was a good man, a good provider, a good father…he didn’t beat me…he
wasn’t a drunk but they didn’t think in terms of love.
All of them could not wait to marry. It was a way out of
their parent’s rule and to be on their own. They looked to marriage and having
children as a major achievement and this was their definition of success. A good
provider was key to all of them. They all defined themselves and their lives by
their husband’s financial success and their children. Unlike us today, who seek
to match so many different criteria to define ourselves and our relationships,
they were much less complicated. They simply sought someone they shared common
values with, someone who would treat them kindly and maybe they could grow to
love, but mostly they married for security and family. They wanted someone to take
care of them and be a good provider.
When you consider that the average American life
expectancy then was age 53 for a man and 54 for a woman and that is only if you
survived childhood, maybe there was a good reason they didn't spend years
trying to "find" themselves. Or date incessantly to find "Mr. or
Mrs. Right."
